This makes sense. Although it won’t materially impact the top line this year, it could in the future. The key question here is whether someone can solve the local ad scalability issue without an army of salespeople. I favor this approach but I’m sure the landscape will look quite different in twenty years.
One is a new ad system from Yahoo, currently installed at about 100 newspapers, that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed at specific audiences, like car buyers or sports enthusiasts. The system puts users into those groups based on the pages they visit online, a technique known as behavioral targeting.
This allows publishers to sell, say, high-priced travel ads not only on travel pages but also on any page visited by a user interested in travel.
ECPM BLOG 